1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a liquid ejecting apparatus and an inspection ejection unit designation data generation circuit.
2. Related Art
It is known that a liquid ejecting apparatus such as an ink jet printer which prints an image or a document by ejecting ink uses piezoelectric elements (for example, piezo elements). The piezoelectric elements are provided in correspondence with each of a plurality of nozzles of a head unit, and each of the piezoelectric elements is driven according to a drive signal. Thereby, a predetermined amount of ink (liquid) is ejected from the nozzles at a predetermined timing, and thus, dots are formed on a medium such as paper.
However, if ejection failure of the nozzle occurs, normal dots are not formed on the medium, and quality of the image which is formed on the medium decreases. In contrast to this, for example, JP-A-2015-047737 proposes a supplementary technology which sequentially inspects states of each nozzle and forms dots by ejecting ink from other normal nozzles instead of ejecting the ink from the nozzle having ejection failure.
However, the method described in JP-A-2015-047737 requires transmission and processing of the same data as the amount of transmission data according to a normal print operation so as to inspect each nozzle, and particularly, if the number of nozzles increases, the transmission and processing of the data become a bottleneck, and thus, a problem occurs in which inspection time increases. Particularly, an ink jet printer which performs printing at a high speed using many nozzles, such as a line ink jet printer or a printer performing high resolution printing, has an important task of reducing the inspection time which is increased according to an increase of the number of nozzles.